Park, Joonhyeong

This paper argues that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, conversely, what constitutes an ongoing genre also depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects. In social semiotics, a genre is a culturally evolved way of doing things with language (including non-verbal representations). Genre provides a useful lens to understand how a community’s cultural norms and practices shape the use of language in various human activities. Despite this understanding, researchers have seldom considered the role of scientific genres (e.g., experimental account, information report, explanation) to understand how students in science classrooms make meanings as they use and construct multimodal representations. This study is based on an enactment of a drawing-to-learn approach in a primary school classroom in Australia, with data generated from classroom videos and students’ artifacts. Using multimodal discourse analysis informed by social semiotics, we analyze how the semantic variations in students’ representations correspond to the recurring genres they were enacting. We found a general pattern in the use and creation of representations across different scientific genres that support the theory of a mutual contextualization between genre and representation construction.

The construction of scientific explanations is considered an important component of scientific practices in science classrooms. When constructing explanations, students utilise multimodal representations to make and convey specific meanings, which are useful in supporting their thinking and learning. The mastery of these recognised functions makes up and signifies representational competence. However, the literature has yet to offer a clear description of the demonstration of representational competence from the perspective that views competency as a goal-oriented meaning-making process that relies on specialised representations. This research took a case study approach and collected data from six first-year undergraduates tasked to construct scientific explanations of phenomena. Using multimodal discourse analysis, we identified sequences of representations that suggest how particular disciplinary meanings were realised. The results showed that students demonstrated representational competence by making available, recognising, and utilising what we termed as potential disciplinary meanings. These meanings acted as a basis with which to construct new meanings that fulfil the explanation. The same potential disciplinary meanings were recognised and utilised to varying extents by different students leading to diverse outcomes. Based on the findings, we discussed the significance of potential disciplinary meanings towards understanding and developing representational competence.